Holy shit! Are those wings? Is he still an aasimar? Did he actually become the Divine Herald of Lady Celestial!? And now that you mention it, how exactly did he get down to Hell? Can Paladin just cast plane shift at will now? IS HIS NAME EVEN PALADIN!?!?!?!
There are party shakeups and character growths afoot in Handbook-World! And not a moment too soon either. As long-time readers know, the approach of of Devil’s Night heralds a thinning of planar boundaries. The things that lurk Beyond may find purchase in our world, and the forces of evil are on the rise throughout the multiverse. Portents of doom! Dire warnings! Yada yada!
Be that as it may, we aren’t here to talk about the imminent destruction of the Prime Material. We’re here to talk about beacons of hope descending into the Pit. We’re here to talk about the opposite of Lawful Stupid. We’re here to discover how to play a non-obnoxious paladin.
As a starting point, I’ve always had a soft spot for Bodhi’s Guide to the Optimal Paladin. In the first place, given the class’s reputation for being a gigantic stick in the mud, I love that an optimization guide paused a minute to optimize roleplay. And I really love the names for the play style (see “Roles to Play” on page 4). Pithy phrases you can carry in your back pocket are a good object lesson for all of us. When you hear “the eternal optimist” or “the holy pain,” you instantly know what kind of paladin we’re talking about.
And so, for today’s discussion, why don’t we try to expand the list a bit? Try to come up with your own “paladin RP archetype.” What is it called, and how does it exemplify your favorite style of paladin? Give us all your best “grim gunslingers” and “party moms” and “drunken lecherous friars” down in the comments!
He did it! He came all the way Down There to save them from Heck!
And man, that Angel Wings feat looks great on him.
I imagine Oracle smiled when she called Paladin a jerk.
As for optimal Paladins… I refer you to one O-Chul. Seriously, he’s got Paladin goals writ large all over him. He’s got duty, but also compassion. He’s got honor tempered by wisdom. And he endures. He chose to be a Paladin later in life, and that shows you what kind of person he is; it wasn’t a career move, it was a hard choice he made so he could make the world a better place by shaking up his Paladin order.
Oh yes.
O-Chul.
Madeline, in another webcomic.
In official wizard literature, there is the paladin from Legacy of Wolves by Marsheila Rockwell, in Eberron. Not too far off the mark. It may help he is evenly sharing the spotlight with the two other main characters, the ranger and the artificer.
I know Madeline.
Madeline is solid gold awesome.
… But I think she could still learn a lot from O-Chul.
I quite liked Angie in this one: https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/dungeons-doodles-tales-from-the-tables/divine-sense/viewer?title_no=682646&episode_no=22
She’s pretty great on the following two pages as well!
One of my favourite paladins remains the one I was in the epic Ravenloft game(tm) with, though: Tomas Eisenwald. Raised by Dwarves. In a sense the vessel of Lothurr, Lamordian god of lightning and quickening. Part flesh golem. All hero, all good.
Thanks for the pointer! I just did an archive binge.
Welcome to Handbook-World. Please enjoy you binge. 😛
If you’d like to hang out on the Discord:
https://discord.gg/F2jxqaQ9
O-Chul is fantastic. Doesn’t appear until a few hundred pages in, but well worth the read: https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html
I gm for a Pathfinder party that has a Paladin of Sarenrae who so far has attempted to get every sapient enemy to surrender, but has when the enemies attack anyway strikes them down. And is playing them as a very friendly person who tries to help people so long as it doesn’t require them to break their code.
Gotta love that consistency!
I’m running an inquisitor of Iomedae at the moment, and the struggle between honorable combat and effective killing has been great fun to play.
Oracle doesn’t make mistakes with her predictions and prophecies – his new name/title is clearly Jerk.
Is there no meat this Oracle can’t jerk?
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FBlNreO8jzYzQl1jF4DH8y8aYNxkHwpRseGVGjKlFmqQ.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D3bdfff7cc8d34c24301da15ef034c1fe2e129c89
I’d argue Paladins new title is DMPC, DNPC (Divine NPC), or DQG (Divine Quest Giver). He’s magnitudes more powerful than most PCs, he directly answers to a Deity (for now), he has an official monster statblock/template (Divine Herald) and is acting to bring other PCs back on the rails of the plot and out of the consequences of their own actions.
There’s only one way to test this. Has anybody got a rock?
https://www.tumblr.com/startreklesbian/716511544679202816/dungeons-dragons-honor-among-thieves-2023
Any chance of a Gazeteer-style statblock of what a Divine Herald of Lady Celestial has, special abilities wise? They always have some ability or trait directly linked to their Deity’s nature.
What edition are you angling for?
Pathfinder probably, though it could be dumbed down to 5e stuff as well. Here’s a big list of em’!
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Herald#:~:text=A%20herald%20is%20the%20incarnate,permission%20of%20their%20divine%20patron.
And the actual template.
https://www.aonprd.com/MonsterFamilies.aspx?ItemName=Herald
I love playing the “Deus Vult” type paladins. What can I say? I’m a fan of Warhammer and I like turning my brain off and hitting things (in game).
The trick is to remember how actual crusaders justified their own bad behaviour (to put it mildly): since you (and your party) are doing God’s work, any misdeeds committed in pursuit of those goals are clearly justified and automatically forgiven. That way, you don’t have to smite your mates for being heretics, so long as your crusading against a greater threat. Just remember your ABC: Always Be Crusading
Does that ever get obnoxious for the other players at the table? Or is everybody on board for the murderhobo stylings?
I’ve said before, I always put less emphasis on the lawful aspect of paladins, and focus more on good. And that’s “good” rather than “Good”… they may be aligned with cosmic forces, but above all, they’re good human beings (or race of choice)… they’ll smite evil if that needs doing, but their job is to help people.
Thinking on this a bit more today, I think the important question is — what values does your paladin embody, and what to they most strongly oppose?
Consider that a paladin motivated by a desire for justice, and who believes that justice is found when what’s lawful is aligned with what’s good. That character will be generally opposed to evil on principle, but they may be particularly obsessed with what happens when law is *not* aligned with good. He calls that tyranny, and the has a particular enmity for those who turn law toward injustice… indeed, though strongly lawful himself, may regard chaos as preferable than law used for evil.
This is why it’s important to think about your paladin code for a second. Do you never, under any circumstances, leave a companion behind? Is it about smiting evil at all costs? Tell no lies? Pick *a* lane rather than *all* lanes and this mess becomes a lot easier to deal with.
I’m imagining something of a Gandalf situation. “Paladin? Yes. That was what they called me. Now I am Homebrew Deity the White.”
As for paladin roles, an interesting if tricky-to-execute possibility would be the divine defense attorney. (The Phoenix of Righteousness, if you will.) Someone who takes the devils’ trick of twisting the letter of the law against its spirit and turns it against corrupt systems, forcing them into justice and fairness whether they like it or not. It would take a fair amount of coordination with the DM to pull off (and possibly an actual law degree,) but it could lead to some great roleplaying moments.
Let’s see if we can’t make this make sense.
“Ancient mandate dictates we sacrifice a virgin to the beast each spring tide, else the city will flood.”
How does your paladin circumvent this law?
“I didn’t hear anything about it being a humanoid virgin. Any lambs in the area?”
While I like the basic premise, at least a person can consent to being sacrificed.
An animal can not.
Nicely done. 🙂
Gonna call my Paladin archetype “Here To Help”. Because I think that’s the most important thing: you’re not here to take control, you’re not here to police your party members, and you’re not here so that you’re the only one having fun. You’re here to help, to do as much good for as many people as possible, and that includes supporting your friends.
I remember being saddened when my teenage wizard got caught disguise-selfing his way into the women’s hot springs. It was full on anime trope, and he ran into the party paladin while being chased by loads of angry dwarf chicks.
“You gotta help me!”
Nope. Just straight up turned my dude in. No hijinks, no nothing. That plausible paladin behavior, but it bothered me that my fun was straight up quashed. I wish he’d extracted a “you owe the gods one for this” out of me or something.
Yeah, exactly. “Turn them in” makes sense as a lawful characters first instinct, but it’s also the least interesting possible direction for the scene to take (and the one most likely to result in fun-souring player conflict). As a Paladin, you should try to find a superior third option. As the *player* of a Paladin, it’s your actual responsibility to try to find one. That’s my philosophy, anyway.
My favorite watch-phrase is: ‘Do no harm, take no shit’ – but maybe not in the way people expect it. I think of ‘do no harm’ as the lawful part, the idea that law isn’t what’s written in documents or imposed on the people, but a name for the desire for safety, for stability, and the reassurance of known things. Take no shit is good, in the simple sense of a refusal to accept the worst in people. Take prisoners and redeem them if you can, but cut them down if you can’t. Simple put, don’t tolerate anything that would make the safety of law into an unbearable slog. Lawful evil, or even lawful neutral, are worse options than the chaotic versions because chaos is by its very nature easier to overturn.
I’ve spoken of Nuden before. He falls close to the Harmonizer and Paragon of Virtue in the linked guide. He would never call himself a Paragon of Virtue.
Nuden was an aasimar by stats, but in this world, aasimars were effectively cursed/blessed with a constant reincarnation from being in the presence of a Goddess when the Goddess was killed. If they died, a new aasimar would form into existence some miles away with little to no memories of their past self, but fully grown.
Nuden was convinced his previous life was that of a mass murderer. A serial killer who had no remorse for anything he did. Horrified at those memories, Nuden devoted himself to Good and, incidentally, to Law.
As a guide, I would call him a Diplomancer. Like Prince Chrom above, Nuden tried to talk diplomatically to literally everything, even things that he assumed weren’t sentient because you never know. He prevented one fight that way. Combat wise, he basically just defended other. I sacrificed most of what makes a paladin to get more powers for defending others. To quote Drew Hayes “A paladin’s greatest weapon is their shield.”
When confronted by the inequality in society, he opened a lawyers guild to fight for people wrongly accused of crimes and to try and find alternatives to prison. He was working to prison reform. He organized peaceful labor strikes, carefully filling in the forms to have a public gathering legally.
He was the paladin I talked about when you brought up Woolantula the Servile’s quest. Nuden would try to reform even Demons if there was any chance of it.
He served no God (thus damn near no divine powers to speak of) but his background feat for the game was the Eschatologist. He believed strongly that there would be an eventual end to his eternal reincarnation, but if the Gods could die, there must be something even greater.
He also joined the bad guys team when they promised they were working for the greater good and he sensed no lie. That the bad things were caused by people who used the organization for power and they wanted him to help them police their organization.
It was a good excuse for him to leave as we were moving to new PCs.
Much later, the group snuck into the evil organization to find him watching over the bad guys. And when their leader went full power mad, he immediately opposed them and helped the PCs get out, including ultimately sacrificing himself by Defending Other the boat from magical cannonballs.
This was an idea for a paladin character that could be considered an archetype;
When we think of paladins, the religious aspect is often at the forefront. But the core nature of a paladin is belief/faith not in divinity, but in ideals. The Dresden Files’ Knights of the Cross are a good example, with Michael being a classic paladin, but then we got one who is an accidental christian and kinda just rolls with it, and an atheist of all things.
Then we come to the latest one, and we get this quote about the nature of the latest one.
“Belief in a story, of good confronting evil, of light overcoming darkness, of love transcending hate. Is it that where all faith begins?”
Which led my brain to The Impossible Dream (The Quest) from Man of La Mancha. The mission of each of true knight, his duty, nah, his privilege.
—
To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
And to run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are to weary to reach the unreachable star!
This is my quest to follow that star
No matter how hopeless no matter how far
To fight for the right without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell for a Heavenly cause!
—
So I guess one could call this a Quixotic, a paladin trying to live out an ideal.
Of my favorite Paladin-types that have crossed my table:
-) My own LG Cleric/Monk/Tough Hero//Contemplative priest of Heracles: “All things are possible through He who gives me strength.” By level 12, his club was merely a divine focus or a means of destroying fortifications, as his spells, fists, and phenomenal strength (and grappling prowess) handled most situations without weapons. His simple optimism often carried the party.
-) Bradamante (“Brandy”), a Swashbuckler-turned-Paladin after experiencing a holy vision. She doesn’t actually *want* to be Lawful or Good, but she’s religious enough that she’ll grudgingly obey the god’s wishes “until he’s done with her” and she can go back to being a hard-drinking, self-destructive duelist.
-) Chance Drumfield, a 5e Paladin of Tymora who’s addicted to gambling and *really* bad at it, as his amazing luck only applies when it’s absolutely necessary to the plot (and/or combat). Created for a Curse of Ravenloft campaign, he’s a riff on Castlevania’s Belmont family of monster-killers.
As for paladin, he is probably still an assimar as there are feat and/or race abilities depending on edition that’ll give him wings.
As for the name, I’m jokingly gonna cal, him Paladin Twilight Sparkle since he’s got wings and was trained by Lady Celestia– I mean Celestial.
If we want a more serious name, like how Antiantipaladin’s name is actually Vengeance, we could add some form of ‘Champion’ to the name, since that’s what PF2E paladins are called. Paladin Champion. Champion Paladin. Superpaladin. Or just stick with Divine Herald/Champion (Though I’ll still call him Paladin.)
Oh, and considering the flavour text, it raises the question of antipaladin as well. The easiest solution there if you wanted another evil knight character would be using the Blackguard prestige class as a name (or if we wanted to avoid the colour association ‘Blaggard’ is a decent pun).
This is one of my soapboxes with players. Most new players in my games are stuck on the “stupid paladin” trope and prying them off is always a chore.
My third ever character was a paladin and as I have said before, that wasn’t my choice. Seriously the DM and group told me she had to be a paladin once they saw me roll up her stats. This was back when 1e was shiny and new and at this point only the Monster Manual and Players Handbook had been released. We were waiting impatiently for the Dungeon Masters Guide.
There were no tropes back then, everything was new. Also no Deities and Demigods, so we were using Bullfinch’s Mythology. It only made sense to me that my paladin would follow the precepts of her Norse god and their version of “lawful good”. So she was very different from the other paladin in the group who followed a Roman god and was frequently swept up in the politics of that group.
I enforce that in my game, whether homebrew or some version of AD&D. If someone wants to play a paladin, then they need to know enough about their god and the pantheon to play that particular flavor of “lawful good.”
Man, paladins are my specialty. I love playing paladins, and apparently the people around me find my paladins to be refreshing.
I’ve played a team mom paladin, a tragic redemption-seeking paladin, and my current character is a quirky kobold who doesn’t fully understand what it means to be a paladin but by all the gods she’s trying her best.
Usually I play paladins who are of above-average intelligence, as giving them a degree of cunning usually works out to both make them less likely to fall into the stupid good trope and often gives them secondary roles in the party such as being the history expert or tactician.
As the sad redemption paladin, I managed to lead a bloodless coup to oust a corrupt governor through a combination of paladinly charisma and diplomacy checks with clever social engineering and crowd control. The character ultimately died while taking a third option in one of the classic paladin moral dilemmas – had she pulled it off, the third option would have resulted in an optimal outcome the DM didn’t see coming. Unfortunately she didn’t have the raw stats to back up the plan.
The kobold paladin is an exception to my “smart paladin” trend, being the “see and smite” dumb paladin incarnate, but this is tempered by the fact that she’s small enough to be picked up by a party member. So the party can be amused by her antics, but if she’s going to do something game-ending it’s as simple as me saying “this is what my character would do; quick someone pick her up and stop her.”
And, while not technically tabletop D&D, among my CRPG characters have been “disarmingly charming country bumpkin paladin” and “mechanical genius paladin who also serves as the rogue of the party for disarming traps and such.”
I guess this all has been my long winded way of saying that I hate how paladins have been reduced to “lawful stupid” and have a reputation for being bland. If you play the paladin as a CHARACTER like you would any other class, instead of making “LAWFUL GOOD PALADIN” their entire personality, and use your brain (or find ways to mitigate not using your brain), they can be excellently varied characters.
HBoH naming conventions explanation:
Claire: Laurel, were is the bag of random classes? I need to name a new character for next comic 😛
Also Paladin is an Aasimar. They can get wings. At least on Pathfinder, don’t know or care about D&D 😀
I’ve found that adopting PF2E’s tiers of edicts has resulted in paladins being WAY better to play and handle.
For those unfamiliar, your class (and if you’re bound by one, deity’s edicts/anathemas, EG you’re a cleric) rules are ordered in tiers, with the top one being the most important. For example, the baseline tenets of the Paladin code, which are then added on to by choices like your Oaths.
You must act with honor, never taking advantage of others, lying, or cheating.
You must respect the lawful authority of legitimate leadership wherever you go, and follow its laws.
The first rule overrides the second- which means that paladins don’t have to be OK with slavery if it’s legal where they are. After all, they must never take advantage of another. And a paladin of a god that abhors slavery would not view slavers as legitimate leadership, so you’d be free to fight them even if slavery is legal where you are.
This sort of system of tenets ordering by importance and *explicitly being allowed to break lower tenets if it means following higher ones* makes paladins (and their neutral/chaotic options that pf2e also brought in) much more palatable to me. It lets you orient yourself and understand how to navigate a morally grey problem as a paladin / other champion type.
“Is he still an aasimar?” re: wings, that’s actually a feat they can take.
Ultimately… there is no single RP archetype, due to there being so many deities to key the RP off of.
I dare you to name three!
1: The Champion of Redemption. Kyra from Pathfinder Iconics, although a Cleric, fits this. As does Michael Carpenter of the Dresden Files.
2: The Questing Knight Errant. Link from Legend of Zelda, for example, especially the recent games.
3: The Leader. Iomedae from Pathfinder, Hinjo from Order of the Stick.
4: The Martyr-Advocate. Often overlaps with Champion of Redemption.
Names are mostly just stuff I assigned for label purposes.
Family man stick-in-the-mud badass Michael Carpenter? Hell yeah. 🙂
Regarding playing paladins, Firebrandtoluc on the OotS messageboard once said to “try to channel Santa Claus, Mr. Rogers, and Kermit the Frog. Until someone refuses to try to get off the naughty list. Then become Optimus Prime”
Fuck me that’s a good line!
So is he like a Favored Soul now? I think those get wings.
I don’t even know, bro!
Let’s hope Paladin invested in Improved Eldritch Heritage (Celestial Bloodline) to get Wings of Heaven, and not that garbage Angel Wings feat. I get game balance, but sometimes I wonder if it ever occurred to the game designers whether the thing they were offering was even worth it.
“Holy shit! Are those wings? Is he still an aasimar?”
I mean protector Aasimar can already manifest wings. Once a day for a limited time though.
You push up your glasses when you’re talking to me! 😛
Cloaker Paladin: basically you run at people with booming blade and commit SMITE where necessary. Best combined with grave cleric and fighter so you can path to the grave and a hold spell for a big nuke
I have a character that took two levels of Paladin in his original build. But I took the Oathbound archetype with Oath of the People’s Council. So he traded out Smite Evil for Inspire Courage. The rest of his build was one level of Inspired Blade Swashbuckler with the rest being Eldritch Scion Magus. He’s technically a prince, an illegitimate child of the king, and was exiled when he was framed for murder. I try to play him as him wanting to learn how to be a good leader of his people when he finally manages to clear his name and can go home.